UNIVERSAL::require eats/hides compilation errors in the required modules and does not propagate raised errors into $@, but into $UNIVERSAL::require::ERROR, a variable that is not checked and not documented anywhere - this blame goes in equal parts to Schwern who wrote it and Simon Cozens who used it.

Wrong, it propagates errors to $@.
We already talked about that?

I haven't looked at the development versions of Maypole, but for Maypole 1.7, the current CPAN version, much of the needed documentation needs to be hunted down in the Maypole Wiki and on the Maypole mailing list and can't be divined from the Pod.

Well, 1.7 is very very outdated.

My beef with the Maypole concept of creating a URL stems from an actual example - Maypole URLs look like :
/$application/$table/$action/$row_id
but in my application, a photo gallery, I want to display an image in a resolution, and the image filename and the resolution parameters come from the database. Maypole provides no nice way in which the above scheme can be conveniently expanded to take more than one table/row_id, except adding them as CGI query parameters - but then, why have the "fancy" URL in the first place?

You can just overload parse_path() with whatever you want!
It's very simple.

"Wildly spewed warnings that can't be disabled" occur in Maypole::Session::AuthCookie, which has tracing/debugging warnings left enabled and fills up the logs nicely with it. I'd like something along the log levels of LWP or DBI, where you have a good granularity of what you want to see and how much of it.

I did not post these points as complaints, I see these points more as "things to be fixed" - and while I plan to work on these points, I don't have the time and energy currently. I'll join the mailing list soonish I hope, but there are also talk proposals to be written and real life to be managed ...

Hehe, most of your "things to be fixed" (if not all) are already fixed. ;)
We have a strong and growing community, so things change very fast.

The mailing list is not that big, it's easy to follow.
But you can also visit us in #maypole at irc.perl.org.